Back in the days of Clough and Shankly, some stern words and a good clip around the ear were all that was needed to keep your players in check.

These days, you might find it difficult ordering your star striker to come off the bench when he’s a 19-year-old multi-millionaire with a chip on his shoulder and 14 cars on his drive.

For most of us with even a passing interest in the beautiful game, the closest we get to dealing with such problems is in the form of a fantasy football league .

Every August, we scroll down the list of names – some familiar, some panic summer buys – and decide who is good (or cheap) enough to make it into our fantasy team.

And then once we’ve picked Rooney, Aguero and Bale, we throw in some bargain basement centre-half to use up our last £1.2m. That is how this yearly ritual works. However, all that could be about to change as quickly as a kneejerk substitution.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have come up with a piece of computer software which they believe can lead a fantasy football league team to glory.

Their artificial intelligence programme, called SquadGuru, was devised at the university’s electronics and computer science department.

PhD student Tim Matthews came up with the initial idea for the software and he enlisted the help of Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn, a computer science lecturer, and visiting researcher George Chalkiadakis to bring it to fruition.

What team did the SquadGuru software pick? Find out by clicking link below

The programme picks the players it thinks will garner the most fantasy league points through a series of algorithms developed by researchers. Initially, the calculations had been earmarked for use in assembling emergency services teams to tackle fires. Instead they have been recalibrated for a different kind of firefighting: avoiding fantasy football relegation and humiliation.

In limited testing at various points during last season in the official Premier League fantasy football website, the artificial football manager finished in the top one per cent of the 2.5m players signed up.

But this year SquadGuru is going to tackle a full season for the first time. And it’s going to do it in Metro’s own Fantasy Football game. The researchers have created their own team for the competition.

‘The software works by taking in a number of statistics about player performances during past games and then performs a look ahead into future games to see if there is a long-term reward to having a given player in the team,’ said Dr Ramchurn.

‘By estimating such rewards for all the players in the league, we find out the best set of players that can be bought using the current budget, taking into account the cost of transferring players.’

But what is the fun of fantasy football if all the work is done by a piece of software? Can it really recognise when Mario Balotelli is having a mid-season strop, or when Lee Cattermole is serving another suspension?

With this in mind, machine will combine with man to create the perfect fantasy football manager.

‘Some input will include predicting whether a player will actually play any given number of minutes and this may depend on minor injuries, the formation adopted against a certain team, or even the player’s relationship with his manager,’ said Dr Ramchurn.

Despite the sophistication of the software model, he believes the extra ingredient that could be the difference between winning the league and merely a Champions League place will be brainpower.

‘There are limits to what you can capture solely from data – human input is likely to be the key to translating the soft information you get about players in order to really top the league,’ he said.

The difference between the maximum points on offer and the top score for a player in the Premier League’s official fantasy game last season was about 1,400 points, meaning there is plenty of room for improvement.

‘This tells us there is a big margin of uncertainty that humans cannot yet capture and if we did manage to capture it, we could win easily,’ said Dr Ramchurn.

The research has been carried out as part of the ORCHID research project, which is seeking to combine human knowledge and computer systems to solve scientific problems.

SquadGuru looks for the same qualities in players that we all do when compiling our teams.

‘It likes players that score goals and play lots of games and are very cheap. It likes them even more if they are playing against weaker teams in the forthcoming weeks.’

He said the time when real football teams will be managed by computer is not as far off as Sir Alex Ferguson and AVB might like to think.

‘The big step remaining to happen is to go from team data analytics to team formation analytics. While this will help choose teams optimally from a tactical and performance related point of view, the job of the manager will turn to more soft skills related to making sure the players play as a collective with the right attitude – a bit like the Spanish/Barcelona players.’

However, there is one variable in football – and fantasy football – that even the world’s most powerful computer could not account for.

‘We also believe a great part of the success of the previous league winners is down to luck,’ said Dr Ramchurn. ‘Let’s hope we’ll also have some of that!’

COMPETITIONThis season Metro Fantasy Football will be giving away £20,000 and 50 iPads. It is free to play, so simply choose your dream team and pit your wits against other players for the chance to win big this seasonTest your football knowledge and take on the computer! Enter the Challenge Squad Guru league today for your chance to win the new iPadGo to metro.co.uk/fantasy and use the league pin number 131124 to take on SquadGuru. The manager whose team tops the mini-league at the end of the season wins an iPad